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Begin with the bower. Picture it at the hour of meeting: a pavilion woven of Mādhavī creepers, the slender vines tangled overhead and pouring down a roof of pale, fragrant bloom. The flowers open by the hundred, and their sweetness travels on the air until the thirsty bees, drunk before they ever taste, come humming in their dark companies; their low buzzing, the madhupa-kākalī, fills the leaves. Drunken cuckoos answer from the branches, throwing their honeyed cries into every quarter of the sky, and the whole grove seems to ache with music. A soft breeze moves through, and at its touch the forest creatures shiver in ecstasy. The peacocks fan their feathers wide and begin, slowly, to dance. The bucks and does step gladly through the dappled shade, and small birds chirp their endless small praises. O grove of Vṛndāvana, you keep your tryst before the lovers do.

Now place Him within it. Śyāmasundara waits, the dark radiance, the prince of Vraja, and this lavish beauty of the wood does not soothe Him. It wounds Him. Every loveliness of the bower reminds Him of Her. The southern breeze, the perfume of the Mādhavī, the buzzing of the bees, the calling of the cuckoos, the dancing of the peacocks: these are not five sweetnesses to Him but five cruel arrows, the very shafts of Cupid loosed against the tender heart of the cowherd prince. He who is Himself the transcendental Cupid of Vṛndāvana, before whom all desire bows, stands here pierced and helpless, undone by longing for Rādhā.

And so, agitated past bearing, He turns and prays to Cupid himself, as the tradition remembers in the Gīta Govinda of Jayadeva: pāṇau mā kuru cūta-śāyakam amuṁ mā cāpam āropaya. O Cupid, He pleads, do not hold that mango-bud arrow in your hand, do not even fit it to your bow. You who conquer the three worlds at play, what valor is there in striking a man who has already fallen senseless? A hero such as you will be mocked for so cheap a victory. And should you ask why I fainted, then hear it: some doe-eyed girl, tasya eva mṛgī-dṛśaḥ, has already aimed Her glances at Me, arrow after arrow loosed from the drawn bow of Her eyebrows. So tender is His state that He cannot even speak Her name aloud; "some doe-eyed girl," He murmurs, when the whole of Him is one cry of Rādhā, Rādhā. Though He is Himself the personification of bliss, such are His feelings in separation.

When the bees swarm thickest over the blooming Mādhavī, their humming grows unbearable to Him, and He lifts His own hands and presses them over His ears: dhvanati madhupa-samūhe śravaṇam apidadhāti, the same Gīta Govinda sings it, that at the droning of the swarm He covers His hearing, as one stops the sound of an arrow's flight that has already struck home. This is the paradox at the center of the bower: that He who is the fountainhead of all bliss should taste, in love's separation, the very edge of dissolution, sinking as if toward death under the weight of remembering Her.

And then the turning. Into that pavilion, lit suddenly by a golden splendor, comes the sound that raises Him from death: the faint jingle of waist-bells, the soft music of anklets drawing near. These delightful impulses lift the afflicted hero from death once more. Śrīmatī comes upon Her abhisāra, Her secret journey to the tryst, so lost in love that She has forgotten every direction, and Her kiṅkarī, the faithful maidservant, runs at Her heel and whispers the way: here, O Svāminī, this path, this turning. As Rādhā nears the bower She sees a bluish light steal across the Mādhavī blooms, and Her own heart leaps and trembles; She beholds the ocean of nectarean rasa, Śyāmasundara, the Cupid of all the world, and is shaken with joy. And He, lifting His face, beholds Her: the anaṅga-nava-raṅgiṇī, the young one who is forever the fresh enjoyer of love's play, She who colors ever-new Cupids; the rasa-taraṅgiṇī, the very river of mellows flowing toward Him. The golden splendor that had filled the grove was Her own approaching radiance.

O the meeting of Their eyes. The tradition sings it through Govinda dāsa: duhuṅ doṅhā daraśane ulasita bhelo, at the first sight of one another a brightness rises in Them both, and it is as if They float together, swooning, upon an ocean of nectar. Their eyes grow still, fixed face to face, and tears spill from them. He takes Rāi by the hand and seats Her at His left side, and with the corner of His yellow cloth He wipes the small drops of effort from Her brow. Wondrous beyond telling is this play of Rādhā and Kānu, aparūpa rādhā kānu vilāsa, and the servant, standing apart, beholds it and is drowned in bliss.

This is the heart of it, and the name the tradition gives it: the river meets the ocean. Rādhā is the river, the rasa-taraṅgiṇī, all Her waves new amorous play, and Śyāma is the nectar-ocean, the sukha-sudhāmaya sva-tanu-nīradhi: His own body a sea of joy. As a river pours itself into the sea and is not lost but found, made boundless, so Rādhikā flows into Him. And mark the wonder, the very wonder PDF B cries out, aho: the ocean is full already, yet when the river enters it, it does not stay level; it swells. So Śyāma's heart, full to its brim with bliss, blooms and rises and overflows the moment He draws the Gaṅgā of Rādhā to His chest. This is the mahaḥ, the divine blue effulgence, surata-sīdhu-matta, intoxicated on the wine of love's union, and smara-kṣubhita, shaken even now by Cupid's ache, and yet, edhate, growing and growing, brimming, brimming, the ocean swollen with its river, full past all fullness because She has come home into Him.